As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems, such as portable computing devices, may include, for example, tablet computers, laptops, smartphones, User Equipments (UEs), cellular telephones or data transfer equipments, and the like. In addition to supporting data processing and computing functionalities, these devices also offer wireless communication capabilities for voice, picture, video, and/or other data communication. The same device may support more than one type of technology for wireless communication. For example, the device may support a Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi®) connection, a Bluetooth® connection, and a cellular network connection such as talk, text, and data communication over a cellular Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. The user may select one of these connections for wireless communication or may keep more than one connection/technology active simultaneously for different communication needs.
To support different wireless technologies requiring wireless communication over different Radio Frequency (RF) bands, current consumer devices include two or more technology-specific (or wireless mode-specific) RF antennas embedded at different locations inside the device. These antennas are statically assigned to corresponding wireless modes of operation. For example, one set of antennas may be dedicated to support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, whereas another set of antennas may be dedicated for LTE connections. In other words, current consumer devices primarily include a fixed number of dedicated antennas per wireless protocol (or wireless mode of operation). As a result, the number of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) streams supported per wireless protocol are also fixed.